Best Famous Modern or Contemporary Poets

Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., is an American former boxer and three-time World Heavyweight Champion, who is widely considered one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. As an amateur, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. After turning professional, he went on to become the first boxer to win the lineal heavyweight championship three times.

Alice Walker is an American poet, activist, author and feminist. She is one of the most celebrated in modern history. Her most famous work, The Color Purple, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and it remains one of the bestselling books in the United States.

Carol Ann Duffy is a British poet and playwright born in Glasgow, Scotland. Duffy is the first female and first Scottish Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC, O.Ont, FRSC is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.. poet novelist essayist

Gary Soto was born April 12, 1952 in Fresno, California. He is known as a poet, novelist, and Children's Literature author whose notable works include: “Petty Crimes”, “New and Selected Poems”, and “Living Up the Street”. Soto has won numerous awards including the Academy of American Poets Prize, American Book Award, NEA Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of over 1 million copies.

Stephen Dunn is an American poet. Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.. American poet

Gilbert "Gil" Scott-Heron was an American soul and jazz poet, musician, and author known primarily for his work as a spoken word performer in the 1970s and '80s, and for his collaborative works with musician Brian Jackson. His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues, and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron. His own term for himself was "bluesologist", which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues". The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul.

William Stanley Merwin (born September 30, 1927) is an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands' rainforests .

Donald Andrew Hall, Jr., known as Donald Hall, is an American poet, writer, editor, and literary critic. A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford, Hall is the author of over 50 books across several genres. On June 14, 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Born in 1928, he had a long and prolific career, earning numerous awards and honors for his poetry and prose. His work often explored themes of rural life, nature, and the passing of time. Hall's writing was known for its precise language and vivid images, and he became one of the most respected and influential poets of his generation. Hall was dedicated to promoting poetry and encouraging young writers throughout his life. His extensive body of work continues to resonate with readers, capturing the beauty and complexity of the human experience.

An American poet.. American poet; 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones October 7, 1934), formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, is an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and has taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.